The 1966 Chronotope

Can we believe in the existence of a specific time and place coinciding to produce a series of events so prolific as to lay the foundations for a new phase in history? The year 1966 in Florence – when and where the modern movement ended under the blows of radical architects’ vast repertory – seems to demonstrate the validity of the “chronotope” genre.

- Manuel Orazi

Among the various historiographic genres, there is one that is not particularly widespread, but that has recently come back in vogue thanks to the work of Karl Schlögel and Antoine Compagnon. The former published Terror und Traum: Moskau 1937, dedicated to 1937, the turning point year for the Stalinist regime and the city of Moscow. The latter held a course in 2010-2011 at the Collège de France in Paris, based on the year 1966 and called “1966: Annus mirabilis”. The scenario for every lesson was almost always Paris, for the great books, films, translations and debates that abound in that particular year in French culture. Ultimately, these two great historians – one German and the other French – have revitalised the genre of the “chronotope”, the joining of time and space, basic to the theorising of the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. A specific time and place inseparably bound by their fertility of events can form the foundation for a new phase in history, where time is the fourth dimension of space. Bakhtin defines the chronotope as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (1881). In literature, but also in architecture. “What interests us is that this term expresses the inseparability of space and time. All values of real life and culture are laid out around these architectural points of the act in the real world – scientific, aesthetic, political (including ethical and social) and religious values,” writes Bakhtin, using an architectural metaphor. Hence, to focus on 1966 is more than simply to celebrate an anniversary and study a random collection of events relating to architecture. Yes, it is the year in which three fundamental writings by Aldo Rossi, Vitto